


promises that span the years

by corviine



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Suicide, well mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-07
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-23 21:45:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1580606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corviine/pseuds/corviine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He would have always come back to him, in the end. In the right circumstances, were promises were valid. And perhaps they stop mattering, after the person you've promised them to is gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	promises that span the years

Victor the young man who is always terribly cheerful, and it makes Sherlock wonder what on Earth he has to be so happy about all the time, because the world is awful and dull and full of people who want nothing more than to shut him up, or tell him he’s a freak because he’s different. 

But of course, that can’t be the world that Victor lives in, with his charm and confidence and the skin that is inked and Sherlock always wants to touch, even when it’s wholly inappropriate,  _he_  does not see that part of the world.

Except that’s not quite true, he finds; Victor has seen it only too well, and that is confessed one dark night when there is a storm raging outside. He tells Sherlock about his little sister who loved storms, the energy and the release, and would drag him out in them because she’d not want to go alone, the strange little creature he wasn’t sure he always understood, and knew that few people did. He tells him, quietly, with his eyes closed and leaving Sherlock to scrutinise him, of the way that it was just that part of the world that pushed her, further and further, year by year, as school got worse and she got worse, and in the end, it was too much. He tells him of finding her, but he uses words of crimson and silver, and lets himself slip into the metaphorical a little, because it is easier than remembering the reality of that scene.

And then, he opens one eye and looks at him for a moment, before reaching out to pull him closer. And he asks that Sherlock never let himself get pushed that far, even when the world was against him and everyone thought that he was made from lies and deceit, and his brilliance was something that no one believed in. When they all believed he was so much less than he was, and would be, because Victor always was sure that he would be brilliant. Because finding Sherlock like that, pulled apart by words, ravaged by his own chemical cure? For that was how it would go, and that was what he wanted to guard against— Sherlock and the drugs, Sherlock and his own indulgence, Sherlock and his want for something that would be interesting, but was the wrong kind. It just wouldn’t do, and he didn’t think he could do it.

That was the one thing, he said, he didn’t think he could do. Find Sherlock half dead, or worse. And he’d have to leave before then.

Sherlock chides him for being so morbid, all the way back in university, and assured him that it wouldn’t happen. But he knew, then, that Victor the young man who was always so cheerful wasn’t, not always, not inside— and he merely took pleasure from the little things that he could, in order to keep himself afloat. But he did have to leave, in the end, and his guilt for it knew no bounds, despite the fact that he was merely protecting himself from being quietly pulled apart at the seams by finding Sherlock in a state like that one too many times. And later, much later— years later after Victor was in the wrong country and Sherlock has other friends, his job, so much more than he expected and just as much as Victor did for him —he clings to it.

When he is a dead man, and alone in the dark, his whispered words are loud, and need no answer. He had promised, that even when the world was against him and everyone thought it was a trick, he’d not end up there. He makes that promise again, with closed eyes, and an answer unexpected comes.

A soft voice from near a shadowed doorway, and it is the voice of someone he remembers too well, a lilting amusement edge in the tone as he spoke. And he tells Sherlock, again, that they’d be okay. 

He thinks for a few minutes that it was simply his mind playing tricks on him, and yet— and yet, no, this is Victor, Victor who has grown and has more skin covered with ink, Victor who is offering him a cigarette and smiling, and then apologising, and telling him that he is to stay, now, for the duration. Sherlock needs help, and he will give it. And wasn’t that always the way? 

He doesn’t make it to the end, and Sherlock’s promise doesn’t keep.

**Author's Note:**

> this just kind of appeared? i'm not even sure how much sense it makes, but it's vic and sherls in uni, and then vic having to leave, then his return to help sherlock in the hiatus, and his eventual demise with sherls turning back to his recreational methods. oops.


End file.
